Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (13 page)

She wasn’t exactly sure where she was or where Doc’s ship was headed after this, but it didn’t matter. Raena had been on the brink of death on the bounty hunter’s ship, before Kavanaugh and the others had discovered her. She had hoped they could be frightened into killing her, into ending this endless flight from Thallian. But just as she was too much of a coward to kill herself, she had developed too much affection for the
Panacea
’s crew to really goad them into final action.

So here she was, with the rain driving into her face, soaking through her cape. It was so cold that she couldn’t stop shivering. She almost turned back to the medical shuttle behind her. She could take it all back, ask them to drop her in a city someplace or, for that matter, anywhere warm and dry. She didn’t have the stomach to run right now, even to search for somewhere to sleep out of the weather. She felt so completely overwhelmed that she thought she might cry.

Then something moved amongst the trees, a shadow blacker than the night. Raena froze, but of course she must have been seen. The ship’s lights were behind her as she stood in the scrubland, no cover at all unless she flung herself flat on the spongy ground.

“Raena?” a male voice called. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you.”

“How do you know my name?” She suddenly felt so cold that even her shivering stopped. A quick reality check reminded her that her hands were beneath her cloak.

“I’m an old friend,” he said. His voice sounded strangely amused, as if he’d had this conversation before.

“I don’t have any old friends,” she said bitterly, inching her right hand down toward the new holster Skyler had given her.

“I’m an old friend of Ariel’s, too.” He stepped clear of the trees, coming toward her at a slow, non-threatening walk.

Keep coming,
Raena thought.
Make this easy. I don’t want to do anything hard tonight.

“How is Ariel?” Raena asked, keeping the conversation alive. “Is she safe?”

“She found her way back to the Coalition, if you consider that safe.”

Raena eased the new pistol free of its holster, angled the barrel toward the man. She couldn’t see him clearly at this distance and through the weather, but she was certain he was human. That made the Coalition a possibility, but the Empire much more likely.

She fired off six quick shots. One of them spun him around, took him off his feet. She ran toward him, rather than back to the med ship. Who had Doc told she was landing here? Either the
Panacea
had betrayed Raena or she’d just shot one of their Coalition friends. Either way, the
Panacea
’s crew didn’t want Raena showing back up on their doorstep.

The man was wheezing when she reached him. His hands were empty as he sprawled in the mud, but a pair of expensive guns hung from his belt.

“I’m here to help you,” he muttered as she rolled him over. He was an older man, old enough to be her father, with thinning hair and a beard that eclipsed the lower half of his face. Nothing about him looked the least bit familiar.

Raena shot him in the heart. Then she stole his guns and the belt that they hung from and ran into the woods.

Behind her, the med ship powered up for takeoff. Raena felt adrenaline course through her. She ran among the trees, looking for a deadfall or a cave or even a low-hanging branch. She had to find a defensible hiding place, in case they came after her.

They didn’t.

Raena was left alone in the storm. The weight of her guns comforted her enough to raise a smile.

Raena blinked, refocusing her eyes on the screen in front of her. The curriculum vitae that Coni had prepared for her was still open.

What had just happened? Raena shook herself, stretched, trying to get the blood flowing into her stiff muscles. Had she really just hallucinated that she shot Gavin dead in the rain on Barraniche?

That hadn’t happened twenty-odd years ago. She hadn’t known Gavin then, hadn’t met him until the night on Nizarrh. That had been, what? Months, maybe as much as a year after she’d said goodbye to Kavanaugh and Doc and the
Panacea
.

What the hell was going on?

Now that they had her life story pieced together, Raena needed to ask Coni to expedite the documents she’d need to leave the ship. If something was going wrong in her head, she needed to get herself to a real hospital and have a real doctor check her out. And when she got there, she was going to have to be able to answer questions about who she was and where she’d come from—or they were going to lock her up until they could find out.

Raena swore bitterly that no one, anywhere, ever, was going to lock her up again.

Even as she made the promise, she had doubts she’d be able to carry it through. She had trained all her life to be a dangerous weapon. If she was going crazy, maybe locked up was the safest place for everyone else to have her.

She rubbed her temples, eyes closed, alert for another hallucination to overtake her. When nothing swallowed her up immediately, she allowed herself to poke—gently—at the content of the last vision.

She remembered the elation of firing the pistol through her cloak, even if that hadn’t actually happened. The cloak had gotten ruined, yeah, and she’d had to dispose of it, but not because
she
shot it full of holes.

All the same, as Raena thought about the dream, she remembered the kick of the little pistol in her hand, just exactly what one would expect from a gun that size. She flexed her fingers, remembering the texture of the grip against her palm, the resistance of the trigger under her forefinger.

Did she remember that because she’d shot so many guns growing up with Ariel? Because she’d handled so many weapons as she trained with Thallian? Or because somewhere, somehow, she really had held that same little knock-off gun and really shot that man?

And who was he? He looked like Gavin, all right, but not the Gavin she would have encountered at that point in time. She’d been, what, eighteen or nineteen? That made Gavin twenty-five maybe. Thirty, at the outside.

The man she’d shot was much older than that. Crow’s feet carved in deep around his eyes. There hadn’t been enough light for her to judge the color of his beard, but it made her think of the beard Gavin was wearing when Kavanaugh pulled her out of the tomb on the Templar world. That had been sandy-colored and graying, an uncared-for mess he’d grown because he was too addicted to the Dart to pay any attention to his appearance. Raena had shaved it off of him at the first opportunity.

Gavin shared similarities with the man she’d shot, but it couldn’t be the same person. It wouldn’t make sense for Gavin to be older in her dreams.

Maybe, she told herself, I’m taking all this too literally. Maybe it’s nothing more than a dream. I’ve been sleeping poorly for days. Maybe this is what I get when I decide not to sleep. Now my dreams are spilling over into my waking life, nothing more.

Still, she had pretty much exhausted the range of things she could do to sleep without nightmares. Wearing herself out, drinking herself to sleep, staying awake, going to bed: none of it had halted the parade of death in her dreams. Raena had a horror of pharmaceuticals, but it was beginning to look like nothing else would work.

When she’d been very small, her mother used to give her something called poppy milk to keep her from crying with hunger. It didn’t make her sleep, but it made her limbs so heavy that she couldn’t move. After that, Raena refused to take painkillers, whenever she had a choice, for anything.

Several times, bounty hunters had drugged her in hopes of keeping her docile enough to return to Thallian in one piece. One poor guy gave her RespirAll, hoping to find out why Thallian wanted her back so badly. She chuckled now as she remembered that bounty hunter’s face, once the truth drug had kicked into gear and he couldn’t shut Raena up.

The worst was while she was locked up in the Parrabatta Mining Prison. As an experiment, they fed her a constant diet of some horrific hallucinogen. She might not have survived it, except that one of her cellmates had been a Coalition doctor. She was a strikingly tall creature with bulbous black eyes and fins running down the backs of her arms and legs, some kind of serpentine race. Raena could remember what she looked like, but not her name. The doctor had advised Raena to swallow her own hair. Something about the proteins in the hair counteracted the poison.

The mining prison wasn’t one of Raena’s escapes that she was proud of. She didn’t mourn the Imperial guards who died when she pierced the prison walls and all its atmosphere vented into space, but the prisoners died as well, trapped in their cells. At the time, Raena hadn’t cared. Now, as a non-hallucinating adult, the prison massacre was one of the worst regrets of her life. If she could go back in time, she would save as many prisoners as she could. She would make certain that the helpful doctor got away.

Raena took a deep breath and shook her head to clear it. Wishing for time travel? Really? These dreams of the past were starting to unhinge her.

She rubbed her temples again. She needed good, black, dreamless sleep, without a horrible bloody nightmare to spit her back into the waking world afterward. There must be some nice, gentle sedative that would ease her off to solid, uninterrupted unconsciousness.

It was a huge step to take, but at this point, she couldn’t remember the last time she closed her eyes without a brain-splitting nightmare. For her sanity’s sake, she would turn to medicine. She simply needed to ask Mykah to find her some sleeping pills. He’d know something that was safe for humans. She’d take it for a while, give the dreams time to go away on their own.

And if they didn’t, she would haul herself to the best head-shrinker in the galaxy and find out what the hell was wrong with her.

In the Thomas Allard Home for Retired Interstellar Laborers, Doc glanced over at the Dakarai struggling to breathe in the bed beside her chair. The poor guy was not going to last the night. Fluid was seeping into his lungs from breathing toxins in the engine room of the decrepit freighter where he’d spent most of his life. Doc had done her best to relieve his pain, but unless he asked her for more, she couldn’t do anything else.

She cracked the seal on a new bottle of whiskey, the last Gavin Sloane had given her, and poured herself a stiff drink. It was going to be a long night, but she might as well sit vigil until the Dakarai asked her for more relief or the end came of its own accord. Either way, she was going to be up in the night to attend to him.

The hour and the darkness conspired against her and she closed her eyes to grab what rest she could. It seemed as if the dream was waiting for her.

Raena Zacari stood at the
Panacea’
s hatch, ready to be on her way. Doc had done her best to patch the girl up, mending bones and torn muscles, shoring up her immune system to do the rest. The girl had clearly lived a rough life, but she was broken enough that she didn’t want to talk about it. Doc respected that, even while it made her heart ache to see it.

She’d tried to talk the girl into coming with them and joining the Coalition, but Raena shot that down. She was terrified enough of the man chasing her that she would continue to run rather than put any more lives at risk. Doc had Skyler and the kid to protect now, so she couldn’t say Raena made the wrong choice. She just wished they weren’t dumping her off the ship in the middle of a monsoon.

Doc handed Raena the rich black cloak. “Skyler brought me this from the bounty hunter’s ship, but I knew it had to be yours. Better put it on. It’s raining buckets out there.” The lined fabric didn’t seem like enough protection from everything out there that could harm the girl. “Maybe I should get you an extra jacket, or …”

“Thanks,” Raena said, “but I don’t think you have anything that would fit me.”

Skyler handed her one of the bounty hunter’s smaller pistols. “Thought you might have a use for this, though.”

“Thanks.” The smile that flashed across her face made her almost pretty. “That will come in handy, I’m sure.”

“Cut the belt way down for you.” He passed her the holster. Doc stared at him, amazed that he was being so effusive. The girl must have touched his heart, too.

“Perfect. Thank you.” After a moment’s pause, she said, “I guess I’ve kept you long enough.”

Skyler opened the hatch for her.

“Be careful,” Doc ordered. Stupid and useless advice.

Before anyone could say anything else, Raena slipped through the hatchway into the side-blown rain.

Tarik followed her outside. Doc watched the kids talk at the foot of the ramp.

“Want me to go after him?” Skyler asked.

“You won’t need to,” Doc predicted. Then the girl leaned forward, brushed a kiss against Tarik’s lips, and melted into the night.

The look on the boy’s face, when he turned back to the ship, woke Doc from the dream. She wiped her eyes and had another belt of whiskey.

CHAPTER 7